


i'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night

by readergirl1013



Series: just kiss off into the air [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Depression, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 12:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18992842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readergirl1013/pseuds/readergirl1013
Summary: Vanya is the apocalypse.She kills her siblings. She blows up the moon. She destroys the lives of billions of people. She ends all life on Earth. She’s what causes Five to be trapped for forty-five years.She thinks that it says something truly awful about her that the thing in that list she regrets the most is the last one.Maybe Vanya really is a terrible person.





	i'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night

It’s not _like_ a nightmare, it is one. A living, breathing, growing nightmare she can’t escape.

Vanya makes sure to keep her breathing even as she goes down for breakfast. It’s been a week, maybe, since she first woke up in her childhood room. At first, she hadn’t remembered, but then she had.

Vanya is the apocalypse.

She kills her siblings. She blows up the moon. She destroys the lives of billions of people. She ends all life on Earth. She’s what causes Five to be trapped for forty-five years.

She thinks that it says something truly awful about her that the thing in that list she regrets the most is the last one.

Maybe Vanya really is a terrible person.

(Who is she kidding? She _is_ a terrible person.)

Waking up in her childhood again… that had been unexpected. Worse, none of the others seem to have come back with her.

Vanya doesn’t know what to do.

(Didn’t know. She’s figured it out now.)

She eats her oatmeal dully and then trudges up the stairs while her siblings go to training. It is before Five left, so they have more team training than individual training still.

That’s good. They are always more fragile after individual training.

(She doesn’t see her sister’s lingering, concerned eyes on her back as she walks away.)

She sits on her bed and stares dully at the wall. No one has spoken to her in three days. The only acknowledgment she has gotten is Mom’s hand on her forehead as though checking for a fever. Vanya had stiffened up and then shrugged her off.

She didn’t deserve Mom’s care, as simple as it was. Not after she’d killed her.

She avoids her siblings more than usual over the week or so since she came back, after carefully testing their memories and discovering she’s the only one.

Did they do that on purpose? She wonders. Is this her punishment? Or perhaps they had gone through with it and killed her and this is actually hell. These questions last her until lunch and the silence of their meal. The only sound is a too familiar record playing. Her knuckles are white on her fork.

(She doesn’t see her siblings exchanging worried looks as she stares straight ahead, through the place their father occupies as she eats mechanically. She doesn’t notice the flurry of whispers that break out when their father dismisses them. She doesn’t see them fleeing up the stairs ahead of her, whispering fervently as she helps Mom to clear the table.)

She stares at the wall after lunch, too. She wonders if she is insane. Perhaps she is in an asylum and everything that she remembers is little more than a hallucination. Her mind snapped after years of being disparaged as useless and powerless and she’s been committed. She hadn’t blown up the moon or killed her siblings or ended the world and then time traveled back to fix things. That it is all some mad power trip of a delusion her snapped (crackled, popped) mind sent her off on.

She knows that’s not true. She has done all those things.

Vanya giggles to herself at how ridiculous it is that a broken mind is less believable than superhero siblings for a supervillain her who managed to end the world. It is crazed, broken sound.

It is the first sound she makes since realizing she's arrived alone in the past. In her punishment. In her nightmare. In hell. In her delusions.

(She doesn’t notice two of her brothers standing uneasily in the doorway. They make increasingly panicked gestures as they try to decide who should come in and speak with her. She doesn’t notice they both slowly slink away when they realize they don’t know what to say.)

Dinner is long and slow. The record is about mountain-climbing. The second in a series of five.

Five.

Vanya has never forgotten that Five disappears during the fifth recording, storming out at dinner and never coming back.

She wonders as she walks up the stairs to begin preparing for tonight.

Did her siblings remember that night as clearly as she does? 

(She knows they will not remember tonight. Why would they?)

After dinner, she sits on her bed and stares at the blank page of sheet music in her lap. She doesn’t turn on her lights, without a window her room is black and confining. It is fitting, as much as it terrifies her.

(Her door remains closed. She doesn’t see the concerned looks of six small children, too young for what they have already been through and too young for what they will go through, standing outside her door nervously. They argue, and she cannot hear, her room is soundproofed. Eventually, they will drift away from her door one by one, thinking her already asleep and promising to talk to her tomorrow.)

Slowly, one by one, her siblings’ lights will flicker out. One, right on time, and Two, not much later. Five, then Three. Four’s and Six’s and will be on the longest, as long as they could dare without truly getting into trouble for it, but eventually they, too, will go to sleep.

Vanya - Number Seven - stays awake. She cannot think of anything to write. There are no songs in her head, no words in her mind. Eventually, she scrawls out a triplet of sound. Or perhaps it can be read as a triad.

She laughs soundlessly at the thought that it, that she, will be considered anything but a useless broken string.

 _(I’m sorry. Goodbye._ )

Standing slowly, she goes about her preparations for the night. Pulls on the only outfit she owns that isn’t her uniform - an old pair of Allison’s jeans and sneakers, a loose t-shirt she’d traded Klaus for, and a zip-up hoodie Ben had left in the bathroom open over it. She crawls under her bed and pulls out the things she’s stolen over the past week, lessons learned from a Klaus of a different lifetime.

She sits on the bed and takes her medication.

All of it.

Two months worth.

Then she unscrews the top to the morphine pills they keep in the house in case of injury and takes all of those, too.

She follows it up with a bottle of their Dad’s strongest alcohol, shuddering at the taste the whole time.

She stands to fetch her violin from its case. She has not played once since waking up here, hating the very sight of the instrument that doomed them all, but she cannot bear to be parted from it now. It is the only thing she has ever been good at. The only thing that was ever really hers, even if she used it to end the world.

She stumbles on her way back to her bed, the medications and alcohol are kicking in. She takes a deep breath, but it feels shallow as she sits down and stares at the second bottle beside her.

And then, even though things are starting to feel faded and fuzzy at the edges, she drinks that other bottle and then lays down on her bed, pulling her violin to her chest like the teddy bear she was never allowed.

She’s so tired. She's been tired for so very long.

One of Diego’s knives rests nearby, just in case, but as her breathing slows and her eyes close so she can’t watch the creeping darkness across her vision, she’s glad she didn’t need it.

Her last thought before the darkness overwhelms her is one that makes her smile:

_For once in her nightmare of a life, she is the hero. She’s even died saving someone’s (everyone’s) life._

**Author's Note:**

> The sequel is in progress and will be posted when completed.


End file.
